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I find it bizarre that they single out fishing as a job that's likely to be automated away. I don't see this happening any time soon. Fishing crews are already

I find it bizarre that they single out fishing as a job that's likely to be automated away. I don't see this happening any time soon. Fishing crews are already pretty streamlined, and many things on fishing ships are mechanized. I can see automation replacing more of the post-catch processing on giant factory ships, but I don't see robots costing many other fishing jobs in the near future.

TomMarius 9y ago
Could you elaborate more? From my very amateur point of view, fishing seems like something that could be completely automated pretty easily, but it seems like I'm not seeing the complexity.
- zanny 9y ago
  A large part of it is liability. In theory you could just send a self-driving boat out with a giant net to scoop up a few tons of marine life to bring back to shore and stuff in a processing plant. Or even better maybe make a self-sufficient platform that uses current to turn turbines and just scoops up fish, sorts them, and puts them on ice for cargo carriers to come by and pick up. The problem is the same one as self driving cars on a more massive scale - accountability. When you have human bodies at every step of the process you have someone to blame if you "accidentally" kill a protected species, overrun your quotas, put tainted meat in the market, etc - if everything is operating on its own you get the same situation where self driving car operators are going to try to blame the software engineers if something goes wrong, while the company gets to take the fallout. And the fines on illegal fishing are actually legitimate compared to the token paltry fines in other industries (depending on the country, of course). The economics are completely on automations side here, you could get 97% good fish for a tenth the price with some substantial up front investments today. But that 3% false positive / sorting error case with the inability to blame line workers kills the business.
- caymanjim 9y ago
  The ocean is a dynamic environment. Nets get tangled, lines get tangled, wildlife interferes, weather and sea conditions are harsh and unpredictable. The ocean isn't a nice flat square corn field that a combine can lazily navigate through. We've just barely figured out how to automate picking strawberries in a nice safe greenhouse.
sp332 9y ago
You're pointing out how a lot of fishing jobs have already been automated while trying to argue that automation isn't happening. The remaining jobs look difficult but that's only because we already got the low-hanging fruit.
megaman22 9y ago
The biggest impact to fishing will probably be that we've fished out most of the worthwhile wild food species. I would put my money on any significant growth occurring in fish farming, or things like lobstering, where we are effectively farming. Regulations limiting catches and seasons to try to preserve the fisheries in some state of production have already driven many people out of fishing.

TomMarius 9y ago

Could you elaborate more? From my very amateur point of view, fishing seems like something that could be completely automated pretty easily, but it seems like I'm not seeing the complexity.

zanny 9y ago
A large part of it is liability. In theory you could just send a self-driving boat out with a giant net to scoop up a few tons of marine life to bring back to shore and stuff in a processing plant. Or even better maybe make a self-sufficient platform that uses current to turn turbines and just scoops up fish, sorts them, and puts them on ice for cargo carriers to come by and pick up. The problem is the same one as self driving cars on a more massive scale - accountability. When you have human bodies at every step of the process you have someone to blame if you "accidentally" kill a protected species, overrun your quotas, put tainted meat in the market, etc - if everything is operating on its own you get the same situation where self driving car operators are going to try to blame the software engineers if something goes wrong, while the company gets to take the fallout. And the fines on illegal fishing are actually legitimate compared to the token paltry fines in other industries (depending on the country, of course). The economics are completely on automations side here, you could get 97% good fish for a tenth the price with some substantial up front investments today. But that 3% false positive / sorting error case with the inability to blame line workers kills the business.
caymanjim 9y ago
The ocean is a dynamic environment. Nets get tangled, lines get tangled, wildlife interferes, weather and sea conditions are harsh and unpredictable. The ocean isn't a nice flat square corn field that a combine can lazily navigate through. We've just barely figured out how to automate picking strawberries in a nice safe greenhouse.

sp332 9y ago

You're pointing out how a lot of fishing jobs have already been automated while trying to argue that automation isn't happening. The remaining jobs look difficult but that's only because we already got the low-hanging fruit.

megaman22 9y ago

The biggest impact to fishing will probably be that we've fished out most of the worthwhile wild food species. I would put my money on any significant growth occurring in fish farming, or things like lobstering, where we are effectively farming. Regulations limiting catches and seasons to try to preserve the fisheries in some state of production have already driven many people out of fishing.